A social media specialist in Utah has been fired from his job for writing a blog post about…homophones. (Homophones are words that sound alike but are spelled differently–“their” and” there”, for instance.) According to a report by the the Salt Lake Tribune, 60-year-old Tim Torkildson was released from his job as a social media specialist at the Nomen Global Language Center when owner Clarke Woodger saw the post and feared that the school might “be associated with homosexuality” as a result of it. Woodger admitted to having to look up the word. He determined that a blog post on such a scandalous subject, on the website of a school specializing in teaching English to non-native speakers, was “extremely inappropriate.”
“People at this level of English,” Woodger explained, “may see the ‘homo’ side and think it has something to do with gay sex.”
